Thursday, October 01, 2015

Religion, Nationality, and Trust Redux: How Blameworthy Are Muslims?

This is really alarming. The relationship between trust of people of other religions and trust of people of other nationalities, which I have mentioned in the previous blog posting is one of the strongest relationships in the latest wave of the WVS, may reconfirm my worst fears about Muslims remaining stuck in the 20th Century phenomenon of confusing religion with nationalism. In the previous posting, I showed that for the entire world, the largest category seemed cautiously untrusting both of people of other religions and nationalities, but the second largest category, and not by far, was people who were cautiously trusting of both people of other religions and people of other nationalities. I then showed that the picture was significantly better in the U.S., where a significant majority was cautiously trusting of both.

Then it struck me: I had spoken before about the 20th Century confusion in Muslim countries, wherein the concept of a Muslim community ('umma) was interpreted in the sense of nation statehood. The abomination that is ISIS/ISIL may just be the most offensive manifestation of this heresy, but its roots are unmistakably traceable back to the middle century thought of Mawdudi and those whom he inspired, and to some extent also to the earlier effect around the turn of the previous century of Al-Afghani, who equivocated a lot on those issues, depending on his audiences. So, the hypothesis immediately jumped to my mind: Is it possible that Muslims are the most offending culprits in mistrust of other religions and nationalities. WVS data on religious identity is not very usable, because, it appears, that a person, for example, may identify herself or himself as "Sunni", and thus not be counted as "Muslim." So, I decided to look at countries with Muslim majorities, and the first few results were quite alarming.

Here are the data for Algeria:

The largest category of those surveyed in Algeria (42%) fully mistrust people of other religions and other nationalities. The second largest category (24%) somewhat mistrust people of other religions and other nationalities. Together, more than two thirds of the population either do not trust at all or somewhat mistrust people of other religions and nationalities. This is very sad, indeed.

The results for my native Egypt are not as bad:

However, they are still not good at all. The magnitudes of the two groups along the diagonal of mistrust are not as large as in Algeria, but they are still quite large. 21.5% not at all trusting people of other religions and not at all trusting people of other nationalities is not good!

Pakistan is somewhere in between Algeria and Egypt.

Speaking of Pakistan, it was natural to check neighboring India, with whom she shared the colonial past and gained independence:

India displays the most diffuse distribution of any country that I have checked so far, and, certainly, none of the xenophobic mistrust of people of other religions and/or nationalities. I don't want to jump to the conclusion that this is a Muslim problem, but the evidence is certainly mounting in that direction.

Returning to the West, I wanted to check France, but, unfortunately, it was not available in this sample. However, West Germany was, so I used it, and the results are back to the relatively good ones seen in the case of the U.S., although not quite as good. This is the table for Germany:

And this is the table for the U.S.:

Now, I understand that these negative attitudes in majority-Muslim countries may be the result of their colonial pasts (this is the same excuse that we use for most ills of that part of the world in the 20th century). However, that cannot be the end of the analysis. This lack of trust must be serving a function in today's world -- which may or may not be a positive one. One can compare it to the negative attitudes towards Islam and towards immigration among some Americans on the extreme political right. However, the latter, thankfully, are a small minority.